Let's be frank, affordable housing typically isn't expensive. Construction costs around the country and indeed the developed world aren't too far apart. In the US it's about $100-200 per square foot, in Western-Europe it's €1000-1500 per square metre.
The problem isn't really in construction, typically. Of course, there's always room for improvement everywhere, in construction too. But the big culprit are land prices. Take the Mission, they quote units costing $600k each, not affordable housing. But you're talking about a place where you need to pay $1.5m to just buy the piece of land on which you then build three small $100k units, for an average of $600k each.
Completely different story from the $100k unit in 'Portland', which was actually Gresham, east of Portland, where the average square foot price to buy land+home is <$200. Oh and the units were 375 square foot... $100k is expensive, if anything. The author completely ignores the market realities, again, mostly of expensive land prices.
And this creates the debate as to whether we should subsidise such housing. After all, if you put the same quality house in another city with cheaper land, you could build 4x as many homes, or twice as many that are twice as big or twice as luxurious. Why should we subsidise a fraction of our poor people to live in the most expensive place on the planet with public money that could go towards helping a larger fraction of people?
That's a though question to answer, I find... and I struggle with it, especially because I'm one of those guys who's in favour of these subsidies. Economic segregation is damaging in many ways, plenty of sociological studies have shown. It's important to keep our cities accessible to everyone and create a healthy mix of people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, as opposed to rich enclaves and poor ghettos. But, finding the balance is hard. I don't live in the US but we have similar problems here in Western-Europe with subsidised housing, at the end of the day it's an issue of land prices skyrocketing, it doesn't have as much to do with construction costs as we tend to think. And it's really hard to find the right balance of using public money to buy expensive land for a small group of people.
The exchange rate oscillates, it used to be 1 euro bought you 1.5 dollars years ago but it has been on a downwards trajectory since the Euro crisis. According to some analyses I read eventually euro should reach parity with dollar if you give it enough time (so another decade later it might be 1:1).
This is particularly true in the many parts of the Bay Area, where a major portion of a "house price" is the price of the land it's built on rather than the actual house's (construction) price.
The obvious solution to this is to build taller and thus more expensive housing in major city's. Unfortunately simply building large buildings like this directly results in 'slums'.
I suspect the way around this is to require the first X floors to be affordable housing without subsidy, and then let people build as many expensive floors above this as they want. This attacks the problem from both ends by reducing the impact of land prices, avoiding blighted areas, etc. But, avoids directly handing money to developers which is a clear avenue for corruption.
That plan causes a whole set of other problems when actually executed. First off, two big factors in the price of an apartment are location and amenities of the building. So you can't really build affordable and luxury units in the same building. What you end up with is luxury units and subsidized units. That is certainly a category of "affordable", but the result is a bunch of people will get angry sharing their building with other residents who are paying a fraction of the price for basically the same apartments.
Also not everyone who needs affordable housing is a working class family that is trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You can get a lot of "less desirable" residents like current and recovering addicts or people with mental illnesses. They obviously deserve affordable housing, but you will find that plenty of people who buy luxury apartments don't want to share the elevator with them.
You can just check the Yelp reviews of any building that has a mix of luxury and subsidized housing to see examples of these issues. Buildings like this always attract bad reviews, suffer from high turnover, and therefore have low occupancy rates among their luxury units.
> a whole set of other problems when actually executed
And those are at least as worthy of direct attention and some solution.
If someone cannot handle themselves, maybe they shouldn't be given a subsidized unit in a fancy expensive city, but maybe society should help them by maximizing the help they get, and that is probably somewhere where simply being costs almost nothing, and where employing caretakers wouldn't cost two arms and a leg per hour, and so on. (And of course this doesn't mean ship all the addicts to Alaska/Wyoming.)
>If someone cannot handle themselves, maybe they shouldn't be given a subsidized unit in a fancy expensive city
If you think about it in another angle, the governments aren't subsidizing to help the tenants as much as they are subsidizing the companies that have to hire people at not executive or programmer wages.
I mean you might get a few people who are willing to commute 4 hours a day, but certainly not enough to satisfy SV's needs. I doubt a company would pay their janitorial staff enough to live there without being forced.
"I mean you might get a few people who are willing to commute 4 hours a day, but certainly not enough to satisfy SV's needs. I doubt a company would pay their janitorial staff enough to live there without being forced."
Of course they would if they had to --- supply and demand. Do you really think companies would not find a way to solve the "my office is a pig sty" problem?
What normally happens is rather than paying significantly more, you get people willing to live at the margins and take those jobs.
Think people in Tokyo living in "cages". It starts as people renting a 2 BR apartment putting two sets of bunk beds in each room and now you have 8 young wokers playing ~1/5 of a 1br price for the area. But, now you add bunk beds to the living room, or beyond that people hot bunk so someone in the night shift sleeps during the day etc. However, this tends to unsanitary conditions and adds externalities.
The difference though is that Japan builds a lot of housing, so you can still find a 1LDK (1 bedroom equivalent) apartment for under $1500 USD in Tokyo. (and of course, being Tokyo,you can pay much more).
It will be smaller than a typical American apartment but at least you won't be sharing with roommates.
I think buildings with both subsidized and market rate units are a great idea. (Segregated subsidized buildings seem to be strictly worse.) But as others mentioned subsidized can mean either "low wage normal folks" or "hardcore bath salts addics living on tree bark with 10 dogs and sold the bathtube for drugs years ago, so they smell worse than their dogs". And they need different kind of help. The former can probably be perfectly happy with their current job thanks to the rent subsidy, whereas the latter category is very likely actively harmful to the community and needs serious (expensive) intervention.
Of course we can debate the problem of injecting even more money into a market with already limited supply, and its fairness.
> If someone cannot handle themselves, maybe they shouldn't be given a subsidized unit in a fancy expensive city
You need to solve the problem with your plan where the person who gets labelled "cannot handle themselves" is diverted into an isolated setting with much less stimulation/opportunity. You did say you weren't proposing to "ship" "addicts" to Alaska/Wyoming but there's a much higher level of responsibility than that -- you mustn't write them off / throw them on the scrap heap / set them up for an isolated dependent life by your own standards. It could be you one day.
Why? Barring someone forcibly injecting me with opiates repeatedly or the same with crack, it is beyond unlikely I will ever become addicted to either substance. I don’t think addicts are “bad people”, but once they’ve hit a certain point their physical desire for drugs overwhelms their ability to be present in polite society.
People should be treated with respect and humanity, but they also should not be given a free pass to do anything without consequence. If you’re shitting in the elevator or passing out with a needle in your arm in the restroom in the building it presents a clear problem with the plan of mixing luxury housing with subsidized housing.
I will never be in that situation because I won’t allow myself to be in that situation. I might become poor, I might need to rely on subsidized housing, but I will never be “someone who can not handle themselves” as the GP referenced.
I get that you’re trying to evoke empathy, but there’s a sea of difference in behavior and capability of accepting social norms between your average mentally ill substance abuser and your average poorer person who can’t afford housing. These situations are not the same and there does need to be a filter to ensure that the working poor do get affordable housing without reducing them to having to live alongside “people who can’t handle themselves”.
It’s not a nice thing to realize, but it’s the hard truth. We, if anything, should start providing state run mental facilities for long-term patients again. There are a lot of people who through circumstance or birth simply are not capable of coexisting with polite society.
You are making a lot of assumptions about people in that situation. There are plenty of addicts who developed an addiction to opioids without ever taking an illegal substance. Maybe they are prescribed a pain killer after getting into a car accident and that eventually leads to oxycontin which leads to a heroine. Or maybe they experience some traumatic incident that leaves them with PTSD which interferes with their daily life and leads to drug use. No one can guarantee that neither of those situations will ever happen to them.
> I will never be in that situation because I won’t allow myself to be in that situation.
How do you intend to accomplish that? Remember we live in a world where people have accidents with cars, guns, and preparation of prescription medicines. You do not control everyone else, yet everyone else has the potential to alter your lifestyle in a few moments of recklessness or distraction.
Accomplishing this is simple, but not necessarily easy. You make a choice.
As I mentioned, literally barring someone physically overpowering me and forcibly injecting me with addictive drugs, I will never be a drug addict because I simply refuse to take addictive drugs. Yes, that includes painkillers that may be prescribed. I took none of the hydrocodone tablets I was prescribed after my wisdom teeth extraction. I'm currently using non-pharmaceutical approaches to managing chronic back pain from an injury rather than relying on opiate painkillers which doctors are happy to prescribe.
I am not blaming people for their choices, but I am recognizing that externalities that feed into our choices don't excuse the outcomes.
Were I an addict, I would very much wish someone would treat my addiction instead of enabling it by financially supporting me.
Currently substance abuse is either actively criminalized with enormous costs to humanity (probably millions dead due to the various criminal organizations participating in the trade of prohibited substances) or at best relegated to intervention reality shows.
Furthermore, treatment of most mental illnesses are very superficial nowadays, we have a few volunteer/charitable organizations acting as support systems, but mainly it's pills and some expensive counseling and you're good to go, right back into your old environment, old social circles, old habits, old context.
I'm not saying it should be state mandated, but it could be a lot more state supported.
You could have separate entries for each part of the building and not share amenities, but this gets back to the central idea. If you allow people to segregate by price then they will do so. If every building in a city must have some affordable units then the city as a whole is better off, but it's going to feel less exclusive.
I can see both sides of the argument, but we need to figure out how to build cities that work or we are in for a lot of chaos.
Separate entries are often done, but rightly referred to as "the poor door". I don't think there's much sense in half measures to do affordable housing: making a building that is effectively segregated is less efficient and sensible than the current San Francisco "just pay us" system.
But the poor want half measures a great deal more than they want none. Sometimes a door is just a door, and ya don't need access to the swimming pool, just to your job.
And from that article...
"It’s also worth noting that, even before future poor doors in New York were banned, 40 Riverside Blvd. had 88,000 applications for 55 low-income units."
One problem is that the marginal cost of adding another floor increases as you get taller and taller, because you need to install more infrastructure, like elevator shafts, in the building to support them. That also means less usable space per floor. Building taller, at least megatall, is hardly free.
Sure, but you can look at the cost of an extra floor in terms of land costs. If a single family home costs an extra 900,000$ from land costs + some constant C, then stacking X of them is worth it until adding one more 1br home costs more than 900,000$ + C. Granted, there is a feedback loops and you need transportation infrastructure etc for taller buildings etc, still I think the market can happily build taller buildings than most expensive city's let them.
When you spread people out, you don't have a city anymore. It's just an endless suburb. And people want to live in cities, because things happen there. There are jobs, services, public transport etc.
Not just suburbs but ex-urbs and Podunks. I'm more interested in a solution where we don't all have to live in cities to get access to jobs, services, and transport.
From your comment, it is clear you can see the risk. Creating entire ghetto cities full of poor people who have no way of lifting their community out of poverty? Maybe we could find some menial work for them and pay them a pitance. It would be a great source of human assets for the wealthy. And absolutely self-perpetuating through the generations. Also forced displacement is considered a crime against humanity. Which is what that amounts to (Aristotle's famous problem of whether the man who tosses his belongings off a sinking ship is making a free choice).
So until there are systems in place that are stronger and longer lasting than the economic, educational, and cultural problems which that would create, I think it remains an immoral choice.
True equal access to top tier education (and not watered down education for all), a true living wage and/or guaranteed income, and some way to break through the cultural issues, including prevalent violence and drug use* that such a solution would perpetuate need to come first to all cities. Only then would that become a practical solution. So yes, in theory. But it is at best decades away as a solution, and realistically probably closer to a century away.
* since among the poor, there would be a higher concentration of drug addicts than elsewhere, and they would then have a greater influence on others.
Agreed. I probably miscommunicated a little bit, it's not so much that I don't see the reasons for the subsidies. I do, they're terribly important to keep our cities sane, diverse, equitable and full of opportunities for social mobility, and I agree with much of what you've said. (dating a sociologist for half a decade helped me understand :p)
But rather, that it's hard to find the balance. Particularly because you've got genuine concerns from the hundred thousand poor people who weren't able to get in on those sweet but few 100 subsidised units in the mission who have their minds blown that their municipality spent $600k a unit for them with public money that should go to their quality of life, too. What do you say to them...
I probably miscommunicated as well. I could see you got it, and my main (attempted) contribution was to point out the things required prior to increased housing (when there are large numbers of empty units) which would make the problem easier to deal with.
No, I think the problem must be corruption, either legalized where a variety of non profits add administrative overhead, or downright illegal. For example about a mile from the first project mentioned in this article are luxury town homes for sale, that come with features such as granite counter tops, garages and solar panels. The developer is selling these luxury homes for about the same price as the affordable housing costs. I imagine the developer is also making some kind of profit. If the price was just land, you’d expect that a luxury unit would cost more than affordable unit, not the same.
Sounds to me like if land, not construction, is the dominant factor in cost, luxury and affordable units should cost about the same amount. Unless the affordable units were higher density.
Sorry poor choice of words on my part. I'd expect a luxury unit to sell for more than the affordable unit costs to build. Instead what I see is a luxury unit selling for around just the construction and land costs of an affordable unit.
Interior finishings are what permit a developer’s marketing team to use the word “luxury,” not an interestingly sized component of construction costs or market value.
Why do people need to be in so close? Because that’s where jobs and culture are. Imagine a train system that could get you from the center of any city to the center in another in the same time it takes someone from Richmond to get to SOMA in sf. People could live wherever they wanted, and still be able to participate in the economy. Yes there’s a cost to those systems but it’s how every major city deals with density. We have shit tons of land.
Where in SF do we have shit tons of land? Building high volume transit would take a lot of land -- the entire BART system is constrained by how fast people can load/unload at Embarcadero station. The signaling system could push more trains through the tunnel, but the station can't handle more. The solution to that is to build more platforms. It'd be easy to do that with a ground level station or a shallow cut-and-cover station, but now it'd take digging out a huge cavern 50 feet underground while avoiding existing building basements and support pilings.
BART plans a billion dollar bandaid by digging out the other side of the station to allow boarding from both sides of the tunnel. But that billion dollars doesn't buy any additional tracks, just an extra exit from the sides of the trains.
Even the new 6+ billion dollar transit center is only going to have 3 platforms and 6 tracks for Caltrain and HSR. In comparison, Penn Station has 11 platforms & 21 tracks.
That is where you'd build housing that lets people live closer to where they work, not where you'd built a high capacity train station to get people from a city center to city center.
What the bay area needs is a regional government that could set reasonable housing and transit policy instead of dozens of disjointed communities that only want office space and no housing and stand in the way of transit improvements.
There's no single solution that will solve the housing problem -- it'll take more housing closer to jobs, and better transit. (I purposely left out traffic improvements since that's a short-term bandaid)
Agreed. Municipalities are too poor to afford inter city connections, and states are probably too large and the politics get messy with the rural vs urban divide.
I’m not saying we have a lot of space in cities, I’m saying we have a lot of space between them. Milpitas should be a suburbs.
China is spending trillions on infrastructure and trains and we whine about 6b for a huge train station in the center of a hundred year old city, while we give $1.5 trillion tax cuts to corporations
In America, the poor need to be spread into the surburbs, where costs are lower. It makes it harder for them to get assistance, but economic segregation is impossible to avoid in rich cities.
The city people are too rich to have to associate with the poor. They'll send their kids to private schools, etc. They eat at different restaurants, shop at different stores.
Where I live, in Mountain View, the housing crunch is epic. Developers are pitching many large developments, and the cost per unit is ludicrous. Part of it is that they're building high end stuff, part is land costs, part is high labor cost since we're in a real estate boom, but each new unit of housing in Mountain View also incurs something approaching six figures in permit costs, and the city often milks the developers for things like local park improvements, which passes the costs onto the new construction as well. Sorry cities, you can't have it both ways - can't demand more of developers and lower prices.
> Sorry cities, you can't have it both ways - can't demand more of developers and lower prices.
They (the people in charge of cities like Mountain View) mostly don't want it both ways, they'd rather have the status quo go on, which is why they throw up these requirements in the first place.
If they had trouble getting employees they might. Problem is, google offices are in high cost locations because that is where they can get the talent they want (Kirkland WA and not Wichita KS).
This is exactly what cities should be doing to grow in a smart way: collect those fees to improve city infrastructure, to accommodate the new housing (and business). Improve transportation! Widen roads, add bike lanes. Add schools and parks and libraries. Add water/sewer/electrical/internet that connect to the developments -- that isn't free. How else are these paid for?
I've got a ton of literature review to do in January so I don't have much time to do another one. It's not too difficult to find though.
One interesting starting point is a study called 'are ghettos good or bad?'. It's a little dated, 20 years old now, especially with economic segregation on the rise since then and a sharp increase of academic interest in the topic. But it sets the tone and introduces a little bit of theoretical history, provides empirical evidence for the notion that economic segregation is damaging, as well as its causal direction (ghettos create bad outcomes, rather than vice versa), although it lacks in explanatory power. The NBER is typically well-respected. You can find it here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5163.pdf
For something more recent, this report is another good place to start. The Urban Institute is quite liberal though, so its research is a bit more partisan than a typical academic piece, but it's still good stuff. This research, and others, suggests that it's not just low-income groups who suffer from economic segregation, but that it affects all residents negatively as well, on average. (mostly for two reasons: one is that when low-income groups are worse off, their issues e.g. with crime or drugs spill over to non low-income communities, and two that, simply said, a Google engineer is more productive if he doesn't have to spend his day preparing food and doing laundry, so you need a healthy mix of people and proximity matters).
Agree. I think a better solution is to simply get employers to relocate to locations where land is cheap. People are going to go to where they can get work. If the employers relocate then it has the added benefit of people being able to find work in areas where land is cheap. This also puts pressure off of the dense metropolitan cities.
People have been gravitating to bigger cities, and one factor that's driving it is two earner households. It used to be that if the husband had to move for a new job, he'd pick up the family and go. This is much less possible than before, since the wife needs to find a job too. If both of them work in specialized occupations, only big cities are likely to have appropriate jobs for both. This makes land in larger cities at an increasingly large premium.
I thought she put it well enough to understand, but here's another stab at it:
Fifty years ago, if the husband gets a job offer in a town of 10,000 people with one main employer, he'll take it and relocate the family there. It doesn't matter that there's no career prospects for the wife, because she isn't likely to be working in a career job.
Today, the husband (or wife) gets the same job offer, but the family doesn't take it because the other spouse works in public relations (or whatever) and there are no good jobs of that type in the small 1-industry town.
Most of the people who move to cities seem to be single and young when they do. It doesn't seem so much about couples per say - but just individuals in general who want better job mobility.
As I said, it's one factor, and as harmegido said, it creates a movement towards big cities, but probably equally importantly, prevents movement to small cities, since if either partner gets a hot offer in a small town, it's much harder to accept if it means that the other partner's career opportunities are diminished.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that couples, particularly those that have kids are more likely to move outside of cities and accept a longer commute to live in larger or safer homes ore better schools. Not that they move to small cities per say - but it seems they are more likely to do so than single individuals.
Big cities across the world have seen a massive spike in price in the last few decades. Much of this is due to tax reasons and speculation (both foreign and domestic).
End tax breaks for real estate owners and end the ability to speculate on home prices on a large scale, and housing will become much more affordable.
Or institute a Land Tax, which incentivizes high levels of housing density and housing availability. A land tax is also the most efficient type of tax that exists, and acts as an moderate wealth equalizer.
Your argument is for the equivalent of new Indian reservations. The poor people moving into these houses will tend to be ethnic or racial minorities. There will be no jobs in that area, and no access to transportation, and definitely food deserts, and no education, etc etc etc etc [include an 'etc' for every service needed for a population of humans in a modern western society]. It will be harder for people to live, and the neighborhoods therein would crumble from a lack of access to important resources.
The other thing the argument does is assume we have an "expensive land" problem. We don't. In most cases it's construction costs that are unacceptably high, not land costs.
In Philly and Baltimore, the situation is the same as described in the article. The estimates for building new low cost housing are up to 10 times the cost for private development, so it does not get built - and the land goes back to private developers, and sold to the wealthy. This has been a constant issue for as long as I have lived in these cities.
People are angry that although they can afford a perfectly standard apartment, they can't afford new construction. Apartment developments being abandoned before completion due to low demand. Market distortions caused by development restrictions during the 90s.
There is actually a cost-efficient way to create affordable housing: create luxury housing. After rich people move in, less rich people will get to inhabit those older homes left behind. Restricting housing construction creates a backlog that must be worked through for the market to adjust fully. Some of the benefits of removing those restrictions are immediate, others take over time.
You're right. One would imagine a site called City-Lab would put some effort into answering the question they open. But the most we get is "Perhaps the central problem of housing affordability is one of scale"
If this is what we get as an answer to such an important question, I can't really trust them to really be forthright when it comes to understanding the issues of cities. When people complain about the media, this is the kind of sloppy thing people complaint about.
The problem is absolutely land prices, but there is something we can do about it: get rid of our draconian anti-density zoning.
The commonly perceived idea that land prices invariably increase when upzonings occur is only true in the context of how they occur today: very slowly, in extremely limited numbers, after years of lobbying the government for changes. Land prices are determined by their highest best use, and right now, with extremely scarce housing supply, that highest and best use will always be the most dense possible development imaginable. But that isn't guaranteed to be true.
What would happen if all of the land was developable at density? It certainly wouldn't be scarce, and with heavily increased competition it likely wouldn't be very profitable to build either. Seattle's 83 sq miles of land, at the midrise levels of central Paris, would accommodate 4.6M people, 25% more than the entire 8000 sq mile metro region currently houses. It would take an inward migration of several millions of people before the highest and best use of most land parcels would be to build extremely densely everywhere. There just would not be enough demand to justify midrises everywhere.
So while most centrally located land (like the handful of neighborhoods directly adjacent to downtown) might result in land price increases (because dense developments can actually attract enough demand to fill them), it would likely end up with lower land prices in neighborhoods further out like Beacon Hill or Ballard.
So if you want to lower the costs of affordable or transitional housing development, you gotta do the same exact thing that you would do to lower the prices of market rate housing.
"Seattle's 83 sq miles of land, at the midrise levels of central Paris, would accommodate 4.6M people, 25% more than the entire 8000 sq mile metro region currently houses."
Exactly, which is why there is zero mystery here. This is an entirely artificial, legal challenge. We already know what happens if we let cities develop organically, because we've already built places like Brooklyn and Queens.
> because we've already built places like Brooklyn and Queens.
But then with NYC densities would NYC prices follow? Put it this way, do we have examples where higher densities didn't lead to unexpected higher prices due to critical population mass being achieved?
I'd ask that in its reverse formulation too: if density is the answer, why is affordability in the US roughly inversely proportional to density?
Induced demand, or something with a similar effect, seems to apply to housing at least as much as it does to traffic.
And before we dismiss it entirely as "coasts are more desirable than landlocked middle America," let's take a look at both various coastal cities of varying density in California[0] and various less-desirable (Houston is technically coastal, I suppose, but not in the "good weather" or "pleasant" way) Texas[1]. San Diego is cheaper than SF or LA, but also much less dense. Fort Worth is cheaper than Dallas, but also much less dense, and pretty much right next door in the middle of a bunch of flat land.
Maybe we should start knocking down a bunch of non-affordable housing, run off the people with enough money to move away, and watch that affordability go up? ;)
Right. And more dense areas draw more business which draws more people which draws more business and also increases price more and more... so density isn't a cure by itself, it's part of the cycle that causes the problem we're trying to fix.
The same way "add another lane to the highway" doesn't fix traffic.
I don't think this is right. Highways induce demand in a much more immediate way. It takes time for cities to outgrow themselves. And even a very dense city like New York just simply hasn't kept up.
Rents haven't always been as high in NYC as they are now. It's not as though the city's history is one of inducing demand that it can't meet with adequate supply.
The city has always been expensive, but not in the ridiculous way it is today. I'll leave the inflation calculations to you, but this demonstrates my point:
Traffic isn't even close to a good analogy. Because traffic isn't anything but an objectively bad thing.
Sure the same pattern of induced demand may occur with housing development, but induced demand in urban development a bad thing? There is evidence that if actually accommodated that induced demand over the last half century, instead of suppressing it, that our national economic growth would have been 50% higher than it actually was.
I agree entirely. But I think what you'll find underneath a lot of complaints about housing prices is the desire for neighborhoods to remain in exactly whatever state they were in on the day the person you're talking to moved in.
What is the correct density? It's the exact density that existed when I bought in. That's what people -- incumbents, I mean -- are really saying.
I'm not saying density is a solely bad thing like traffic, I'm suggesting traffic and high prices both are part of feedback loops (traffic is bad :: high rent is bad), and this is exacerbated when in geographically constrained areas. Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, etc, have unlimited sprawl which helps keep both the traffic and costs down, since the regions can be less centralized. LA, SF, NY do not, and none of them show a good example of "higher density -> lower prices." Instead, the most dense parts of them are the most expensive, fitting the feedback loop model I'm suggesting.
That could very well be because growth in demand has outstripped increase in supply without any sort of feedback relationship, but that itself raises interesting follow-up questions. Is rapid growth undesirable for everyone not directly benefiting from higher salaries from the growth, which is probably most people? Do developers have an incentive to keep growth in supply lagging, since it means they can get a lot more return on investment for what they do raise funds to build? Even for homeowners, your property values go up, but so does everyone else's, so you're not relatively any better off/able to upgrade. What are the political implications of that, if so?
In the past, productivity was not so concentrated in a handful of cities, making me skeptical of that linked model. Big confounding factors there in the death of industries across most of the country happening at the same time as increased global prominence and money concentrating to more and more first-and-second-tier cities.
What that sort of model also misses is that you have at least as many people preferring low density to high density as the reverse (based on empirical trends in the post-car US), and you also have a lot of people who won't be happy with a solution to job distribution that's just "pull up your roots and move to a better city, sorry." It doesn't seem to result in constructive policy recommendations that have a snowball's chance of being welcomed.
Driving a personal car is personally desirable (convenience) even if it is bad for society. The same thing could be said about many housing choices (e.g. single detached home).
Dense cities are the one weird trick to human civilization itself.
China has seen unbelievably explosive growth in its cities and has also seen 1 billion people lifted out of poverty during exactly the same time period. Coincidence? People flock to cities because they can get paid five times more than they could back in their home village – they're not cavorting, scheming millionaires. Trying to strangle your cities because cities are bad is the dumbest thing you could do in terms of economic growth other than than trying to strangle trade on the theory that those scheming foreigners are going to take all of our money away.
I'm sure downtown Shenzen is more expensive today than it was when it was a small fishing village. Would the world be a better place if it had been kept as a small fishing village?
The Chinese property bubble makes the USA property bubble look tame in comparison. At least rents are cheap ($1000/month rent is about $1 million to buy). Density doesn’t fix anything if many apartments are speculative investments and not worth the effort of renting out (because rents are low anyways compared to the appreciation).
> other than than trying to strangle trade on the theory that those scheming foreigners are going to take all of our money away.
Wait, you don't think China has been doing this too?
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The US has had decentralized economic booms in the past; even China's current one is based around several cities and regions, and China continues to build outwards, not simply make Beijing and Shanghai ever denser inside the same radius. They do it at a higher density than we do in the US, sure, but other than that the strategy doesn't seem completely unfathomable - I think the Chinese-style answer to the Bay Area is less likely to be "make SF denser" and more "move a bunch of development to the East Bay or Dublin or something and make new companies start up over there."
Expanding on what I said in a separate comment (sigh, I was headed to bed, maybe after this one), we are currently in the US letting many of our cities die while putting a ton of eggs into NYC/SF/etc baskets. I don't think further density in just a few places is going to fix anything price-wise or have any superior outcomes than reducing those bottlenecks would.
You could reach for mysterious counterintuitive induced-demand effects in the housing market. Or you could observe that creating six-figure jobs, recruiting people from around the world, and paying them relocation expenses to come to your city, absolutely does "induce" demand for housing beyond any shadow of doubt 100% of the time.
If Bay Area governments were as NIMBY about desks as they were about beds, we might not be in this mess. Now that we've built the desks, we need the beds to go with them. (Or burn down the desks? The sheer comedic value of a government on an explicit job-destroying program might be worth it).
You can have affordable density (Tokyo, Chicago), unaffordable density (Hong Kong, New York), and you can also have affordable sprawl (Houston, Indianapolis), and unaffordable sprawl (Anywhere in coastal california).
Because density and affordability aren't really related. The only thing that really affects affordability are supply and demand. As a proof of this, feel free to peruse the Journal of Housing Economics for empirical housing price models. Almost none of them show density as a significant factor, and almost all of them demonstrate the dominance of one single metric: the vacancy rate. Literally, the vacancy rate is the only thing that matters. And density is only related in the sense that it is one of the possible ways to increase the vacancy rate.
Isn't the vacancy rate simply a (literal) combination of supply and demand? So it being the only factor that matters in pricing seems like a truism, but obviously a lot of factors go into both supply and demand.
Yes, that’s exactly the point. Only supply and demand matters, density is no more relevant than any of the other factors that influence supply or influence demand. And within the abstract algebraic model of supply and demand, and density only being something that increases demand, increasing density never increases prices. That doesn’t mean that dense areas can’t be expensive; that much is obvious. It merely means that there are other reasons related to supply and demand that made them expensive.
Why are you so certain that none of those component factors could relate to each other in more interesting ways? Why say "it's just supply and demand" when it would be more interesting to look at what drives supply and what drives demand?
Jobs create demand. Jobs bring skilled workers. The presence of skilled workers itself attracts more employers. Maybe the employers move in faster than upzoning happens. Maybe it happens slower. Whether or not this increases or decreases price is just a question of the coefficients on the various inputs. I'd still propose that the missing piece is geographic - cities that can absorb this by growing outward in a decentralized way will stay cheaper than ones that can't, where things get nasty.
But, to move the discussion along, let's just call it demand outrunning growth in supply, dropping the precise role of density (or replacing density in my original post with "geographic constraints which necessitate increased density" or something). Either way the result is the same thing. Do we have ideas that we could try to get turned into policy for stopping this sort of thing from happening? It's a really common pattern, not just in SF but everywhere that's ever seen someone complain about gentrification, so it would be a useful thing to have a politically feasible solution for.
EDIT: it's getting late out here, so I'll add one last bit then probably retire for now. I personally am not a fan of remote work, or cross-timezone collaboration. But I think the people pushing it need to win out in the long run. When it comes to massive density increases, or de-densifying the country by spreading work back out thanks to technology allowing better and better telepresence, I think the latter is far healthier in the end. It de-SPOF-ifies industries, which is good when considering natural disasters, potential climate impacts, or war/terrorism. It levels out costs - you now have the whole country (world?) to choose from - while also massively increasing your hiring pool. It evens out opportunity - you don't have to be able to afford to take a gamble on moving across the country to chase your dream job. It saves a shit-ton when it comes to energy used for commuting.
And if you ask me if a less dense, remote-friendly world is more likely than getting people to reverse course on a hundred-year-old car-powered trend towards suburbanization, I'd wager yes. Especially because the arguments for the latter are pretty unconvincing so far for people who don't want to live somewhere massively denser and who are able to afford their current living situation.
Vacancy is largely a function of the relationship between supply and demand curves.
What it also shows is how open to changes a given market is; if there's too much vacancy (think Detroit) then it's clear that something went VERY wrong in the market.
If there's too little vacancy (think SF, Seattle, etc) then what went wrong is mostly NIMBY and regulations failing to pair jobs and housing increases together. The result is a lack of flexibility and skyrocketing prices.
I doubt that... there's actually ample land for everyone, we've got entire cities, hell, provinces or states, that are virtually empty. North Dakota for example has 10% of the people of Massachusetts, but 7x the land. That's a roughly 70x difference, we're talking about having say 1000 square feet vs 70.000 square feet of space. There are obvious reasons why one state is more easily suited for living (weather, distance from ports or rivers are lacking in ND), but in the 21st century it's certainly also easily possible to house an order of magnitude more people in ND.
And it isn't even just a discussion about low density states vs high density states. Take one of the highest density states, Massachusetts. Its density is about 800 people per square mile. That's nothing... A square mile is almost 28 million square foot. You're talking about having about 35 thousand square foot, per person, of space.
In fact, here are some images of population density of 100.000 people per square mile, more than 100x more dense than one of the highest density US state averages:
Which also cites another calculation on how the entire world population could fit into Texas if it were built as dense as NYC.
The issue isn't really sheer population, it's population distribution. Proximity to other people means proximity to jobs, culture, networks etc. And that means we see small plots of land become extremely scarce and in high-demand, and large plots of land become extremely abundant and in low-demand. You can see this if you look up economic heatmaps of the US, it's pretty insane. Most countries are basically a collection of a few cities where all the money is made and everyone lives. I wouldn't be surprised if cities became the dominant political unit rather than nation states. (not legally, but in practice). I can't find a great image at the moment but this gives an idea: https://cdn.howmuch.net/content/images/1600/where-the-money-...
I think we've just hit the "give up" point in some areas. Even if you can find the money, you have to question who is benefiting, as you end up helping out these employers who offer low pay and benefits.
The SF bay area seems to have finally hit that point where the restaurants and so on are being forced to raise their wages because they can't hire people, and that generally seems like a good thing. It's better if the wages reflect the costs.
I’ve made the argument before that it’s not a lack of housing we have, it’s a lack of livable communities.
We have a housing glut in this country, most of it is just in places that are far from jobs, services, transit, and community amenities. If we created more moderately sized, walkable, transit friendly cities this problem wouldn’t be so bad.
Everyone wants to cram into SF, NY, and a handful of other places because of the access to economic opportunity and urbanist lifestyle. If they could get some measure of that elsewhere, even a not as good but okay enough version, many would gladly move and alleviate the pressure. But because of how we do our built environments these dense cities are islands of urbanism in an ocean of sprawl.
Agreed. I'd almost be inclined to say that SF shouldn't spend its money on SF, but on other smaller places in California. Creating SF-outposts, hubs. At the end of the day, population distribution is the issue, and the only way you can meaningfully distribute populations is by creating reasons for them to do so voluntarily.
Municipalities should lead the charge, but together with companies. Proximity to jobs is incredibly important. If anything, it could be good for companies too. You don't need to compensate a software engineer to the extent that he can afford >$1k per square foot prices.
What we don't really bluntly talk about is this: tech companies are spending more on real estate via their HR budgets than on actual talent. After all, we compensate similar talent very differently depending on the local cost of living which is a variable mostly dominated by housing costs. That means HR budgets are in large part dominated by housing costs.
Obviously this is not uncontroversial. Many in the 'receiving' community will hate to see cost of living rise when SF Jr. and its Tech Jr. companies move in, particularly those who aren't the owner class but the labourer class. It reeks of gentrification. But there has to be a way to make that work better than it does now, which is investing everything in a small radius, attracting all companies and all people, and making it wholly unaffordable while the rest of the country is drained of talent, jobs, economic activity and becomes extremely affordable in terms of land but unable to support any population. There has to be a middle-ground between the two positions.
How much more can you “gentrify” places like Fremont or Dublin though? They’re already plenty rich, they just went with a sprawly, car-dependent development pattern instead? That seems like a place to start.
Affordable housing is a red herring. Even the SF government economist has concluded that "luxury" units also reduce the price of affordable units, with a marginally slower elasticity. i.e. 100 affordable units are better than 100 lux units, but 110 lux units are still better than 100 affordable units.
The affordable units is a clever scheme to block construction.
I was expecting this article to provide some insight in regards to the title. It does not. The article should be titled, “Here Are Some Examples of Expensive ‘Affordable’ Housing Projects”.
I don't see an answer in the article, but are there any comprable unsubsidized housing projects that can be compared to? Is housing simply that expensive to build, or is this a problem of beaurocracy or other inefficiencies specific to subsidized housing?
The quote about reducing the regulatory burden for but only for affordable housing to cut down on the cost seems telling - essentially admitting that at least some portion of the regulations in place aren't necessary and are simply a waste of money.
> The quote about reducing the regulatory burden for but only for affordable housing to cut down on the cost seems telling - essentially admitting that at least some portion of the regulations in place aren't necessary and are simply a waste of money.
It is not such an admission, because it could just as well view the regulation as generally beneficial but in tension with the goal of providing affordable housing.
You are viewing desirability of regulation in an unreasonably context-blind and binary manner.
A solution to the housing a problem never mentioned is intentional communities. They seem to solve a good portion of the problems.
Here's why they make sense:
1. They can be cheap because they can be built in places with low land prices and low regulations. These are the chief factors in why housing is so expensive.
2. They can solve desirability by building together that stuff that makes a city desirable - other people, businesses, walkability, modern design.
3. They're more feasible than ever because remote work is so practical that you don't have to live in the middle of a city for a job.
4. A model for bringing people who have this goal together has been recently validated on a large scale (kickstarter type systems).
So I'm left wondering - am I just not seeing the projects or why have I not heard of them?
Remote work isn't actually feasible for most people. It's feasible for software engineers, and some other high-paid jobs, that don't have much of a problem paying high rent prices.
> They can solve desirability by building together that stuff that makes a city desirable - other people, businesses, walkability, modern design.
The things that make a city desirable (and supportable) are largely natural features of its location, which you either can't currently practically engineer (pleasant weather) or which are very expensive to engineer (like access to fresh water supply). Places that are currently unpopulated and have low land prices are usually lacking these things.
> How come people continue to live in flood planes, hurricane zones, or the Northeast?
Because those places have desirable geographical features, like access to fresh water (flood plains tend to have this in spades), access to arable land (doesn't always support high density, but supports at least people to farm and support farming, because people living elsewhere need to eat), access to natural features that are convenient in trade (like navigable waterways and natural harbors), access to valuable natural resources, etc.
Because connecting them between other communities is expensive and requires more investment then we value on both a state and national level. I would love a state to decide to go all out for fast transit and build communities that way, but we don’t do it well here.
This is a very interesting way to look at the issue.
Income source strikes me as the most significant challenge. How will the citizens of these communities earn money? In addition to remote work, local manufacturing, education, healthcare, public safety, tourism, and service industry can help fill the gap. Quite a master planning challenge though!
Access to natural resources is a challenge, but that challenge might spark solutions we’ll need other places on Earth and as we colonize the Moon and Mars. People already choose to live in many inhospitable regions, depending on purchased water or routinely damaged by predictably destructive weather patterns (I’ve often wondered why wealthy New York financial firms don’t relocate somewhere sunny).
Sustainability is another question I have. Is it more sustainable for us to build up in cities than to set up distributed towns? Do we need to pivot how we aspire to live and what we aspire to own from standalone houses to dense high rise units?
Housing is often not an issue so much as land is. Even billionaires have trouble finding land in the Bay Area, but there are many cities in the center of the country with lots of land where building basic housing would be cheap. The other issue is having the land and housing near enough to a supply of jobs. Look at Detroit, you can get incredible deals but the jobs are no longer there.
> there are many cities in the center of the country with lots of land where building basic housing would be cheap.
Because the places are either (or both) unattractive to live for environmental/geographic reasons or have an economy that can offers few (if any) additional decent paying jobs and can support few (if any) additional people without jobs.
Prices reflect the market’s assessment of value, and usually there is a reason for that assessment.
We have plenty of land, though! The similarly-sized Tokyo metropolitan area (5,419 square miles, 37.8 million people) has over six times the density of the 9-county Bay Area region (6,966 square miles, 7.68 million people).
As a thought experiment, what would happen if a city like San Francisco required you to own the home or condo you lived in, and provided financial guarantees. So any non-owner occupied residence was illegal.
And then the city paid a variety of contractors to build studio apartments which would rent for $500/month without any commitments, deposit or credit score. With 2-4BR for families.
The thought is the city, community & companies build up immense value for real estate owners. It's somewhat unfair to create this fantastic system we have in the Bay Area, where all these smart hardworking people gravitate to work on new, sometimes transformative ideas but then we channel lots of the profits to early real estate holders who effectively got lucky. While unnecessarily adding a ton of stress to people's lives.
Of course, it would never be implemented. But the basic idea is that all apartment rentals would be through an open system via local government and all condos & homes would require the owner to live in them.
That would be an unmitigated disaster. For a start, what is the value of all rental properties in the bay area? Lets say it is 15%. So the government either needs to come up with 15% of the value of ALL rented houses, or steal them in some unfair way. And can I claim my kids and wife live and own their own houses? What if they are 15? Can I own 5 houses? Starting this alone would be a massive disaster - either economically (fair price paid), morally (lets steal rental properties) or pragmagtically (can we guarantee people won't cheat?).
If by a miracle this hump could be got over, it would also lead to massive problems of supply. 100% of new developments having to be sold to owner occupiers, or be paid for by the government, would make it hard to impossible for either side to build much more supply. I can't start a new development unless I am sure I can sell 100% to owners, or the government buys some of the units. Hello massive corruption!
Lastly, https://pics.me.me/the-30-second-guide-to-government-spendin... is an example of how people buy. A Government run rental market would have ridiculously impractical houses, as now governments would have the ability to manipulate the housing market for votes. "X government built practical, affordable no frills units, but you hate them. We'll build you all places you love". Disaster number, what, 7?
It is just a disaster from every possible, conceivable angle.
Not only is affordable housing a right, but affordable housing in a new construction building, with easy access to transportation, free gym membership, free parking, doorman service, etc. is a right too. Plus, the building must be built with inflated union wages, because it needs to be a “good jobs” program. And better get it LEED certified while we’re at it. We also need to make sure any affordable development doesn’t change the “character” of the neighborhood, because single family ranch style homes in America are so very rare and precious. Most importantly, it can’t create a shadow of any kind.
I think 'Affordable Housing' is one of the topics where people gloss over the basics.
* Affordable Housing returns are always below market-rate housing.
* Requiring a percentage of building to be affordable housing is a tax. Builders have an interest in avoiding taxes.
* Acquiring an affordable housing unit is a long term benefit. Those advocating for housing have an interest in acquiring benefits.
* Long term housing prices are driven by regional economics.
* Short term housing prices are can be manipulated. Solving manipulations like the simultaneous remodeling of large complexes; raising rates with too little notice to effectively move; or jumping rates by high percentages in a year have different solutions.
Thinking in these terms separates concerns of equity in society; the high cost of service workers in congested areas; the rise of empty buildings; the gouging of existing tenants; and subsidized housing for some workers.
Recognize this debate has been going for a while. On could argue that providing cheap housing for the Phoenician immigrants would make Athens better for Athenians, or that people like Plato need an affordable place to live to make our city-state great!
We can build affordable housing easily here in Florida; we rarely choose to.
We can build 800sq. ft. (75 sq. m.) apartments in 3 story buildings for about $40,000, not counting land.
But we don't. Because most Americans don't want to live in 800 sq. ft. and most builders want to cater to the middle standard deviations of the population. They make more money selling to people who make more money.
I was expecting more to the article than I got. It doesn't really answer the question. I don't even think it asks the question well.
E.g., is the question really "why is affordable housing so expensive?" or is it "why is housing so expensive?" They hint that publicly funded housing might be more expensive, with a mealy-mouthed "the case has been made". But they give just one apples-to-oranges comparison, and, worse, one hypothetical comparison. Where's the statistical data?
It also doesn't look at all at why we need affordable housing. E.g., with rapidly spiking inequality (in the US generally, and especially in SF), demand for affordable housing is going up.
In talking like we can't afford it, it doesn't put numbers to that, either. For example, in 2015 the US spent $71 billion on the mortgage interest tax credit, 90% of which went to households making over $100k/year. If we stopped subsidizing the housing of rich people, could we afford to subsidize the housing of poor people? And might that giant subsidy be part of why housing is so expensive?
I agree about your assessment of the article, but I think you've missed the question of the right abstraction. Why does SF/Bay area need affordable housing? Sure, the world needs affordable housing, but why does the Bay Area? Why is the right level for affordable housing the region, and not the state or the country or, heck, in the other direction the suburb or street? Why is this city region the correct abstraction?
We've reached a point where certain places - London, NYC, San Francisco, Singapore, Hong Kong and perhaps even Shanghai - are so large and economically important that the idea they should include affordable housing, when there are alternatives that are much more financially effective, seems a little off to me.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to live in affordable housing in SF, when everything is so expensive. Wouldn't it make more sense to move whole family groups to Portland, for the same prices as one of those families could live in SF? Not even that far, to Oakland maybe, or the outskirts.
And why is the right abstraction one house? A policy of whole family moves, or community moves so people keep their connections, would seem like a more sensible idea. People stay in areas that are awful often because they don't want to lose those connections - which I 100% get. So why not move groups of people - willingly - so they have the best of both worlds?
For what it’s worth, the U.S. is built on the strategy of pushing people who grew up on a piece of ok land onto shittier and shittier land to make way for settlers, until the displaced people are in such remote, harsh places that they can barely survive.
So there is precedent for what you’re proposing.
But the argument against it is that people have some sort of right to remain in their “homeland”. And that a
city whose “native sons” can’t afford to live in it isn’t a healthy city. That a healthy city has places for both rich and poor. For owners and operators. For speculators and locals.
The reason you need to do it on the regional level is that you need to provide services that people are willing to pay for. I don't want to pay $35 for a burger because the waiter/waitress needs to make $100k/year or commute in 4.5 hours each way. I want a mix of high end and more moderate/casual dining options in my area, and that's only possible if people can live a "commutable" distance away from my neighborhood bar with the cheap burgers. This extends to every other service you expect or desire in reasonable distance from your job/house -- garbage truck driver, barber/stylist, grocery store checkout workers/stockers, etc.
It's not the correct abstraction. We can pursue affordable housing on all of those levels of abstraction.
Your theory that we should move all the poor people in groups to less appealing areas to make room for the incoming rich is horrific to me. Especially since, in America at least, this will often effectively be government-sponsored ethnic cleansing.
Building up makes sense, but considering complete lack of undeveloped land in this area, that's not really feasible.
In some countries, residents of a city block can work with real estate developers to build-up, and as long as 80%-85% agree, the project proceeds. Not sure if equivalent mechanism exists in CA.
$700,000 per unit? Or even $100k? For "affordable" housing?
Meanwhile, in Mississippi.... regular brand new houses (not "affordable" housing) are actually affordable at $150k, or less than a down payment in any west coast US city.
Or check out a brand new 2200sq ft house in Indiana for $200,000 that would sell for about $2.5 million in the Bay Area, or about $1.5 million in Seattle or Portland
Sometimes I wonder why people aren't more willing to move to new states. I realize that Indiana and Mississippi aren't particularly "cool" and certainly not trendy, but what matters more in life? Being in a trendy spot, or actually being able to afford a reasonable lifestyle?
The price per square foot with the exact same materials, finishes, construction quality, etc - not including cost of land - is 1/5 or less in a state like IN, MS, WI, MN, etc than CA, WA, OR, why is that?
These states are in the same country with the same first world amenities.
But it is the same principle inside a big country like US which is really vast geographically. Look at Europe. Properties in Eastern Europe are still a lot cheaper yet most university educated young people are migrating from east to west. So obviously they value the economic and career opportunities in those big metros in Western Europe and even though flats there cost 2x or 3x they still go.
Just because you can buy cheap house in Mississippi is not going to cause young doctors, engineers, lawyers, other professionals and graduates from top schools to start migrating there. It's just not worth it for them, they are looking at their long term career prospects and can do the math.
Then you would also have to live in Mississippi, and getting a job isn't as easy either (even making median) because the place isn't exactly overflowing with non-minimum wage opportunity. If it wasn't for my dad's skills as a nuclear technician, we would have never lived there (BTW, if you want cheap housing and high salaries, go into nuclear power, they mostly built nuclear power plants where no one wants to live).
In Chile we have an incremental building program: you get half a house constructed and finish the other half by yourself. The cost per unit was less than $10k in 2002.
In Brown we trust, along with Scott Wiener; these are the only two politicians doing anything to address housing prices. In San Francisco, the Mayor's Office of Housing (SFMOH) has created a complicated program of silent second liens to enable 'low' and 'moderate' income residents purchase regular condos at below market rate. Units built strictly for income bands and subsidized, or 'affordable units', run into a problem of funding; it is either developers who elect not in include below market rate units (BMR) and pay into the fund or churches building their own structures such as Mercy Housing.
But what about the land? I don't think that has to be the major cost, at least in San Francisco. There are a plenty of vacant lots owned by the city, and in a recent case the feds sold land for $1 to the city for pre-fab condos near the court house for 'formerly homeless'. Indeed, if you have an apartment, you are no longer homeless.
And this is where we start talking about the real expense -- union labor. The pre-fab units clock in at under 250k each, but they are built over in Vacaville with non-union labor. Anything else needs highly paid craftsmen which goose a market rate unit over 700k+. If the lot needs to be abated for pollution, usually for former gas station sites, the price goes even higher plus delays. Want steel framing for going over 7 stories? The price goes up. Not that SF Planning's zoning will allow 7 stories, even near BART.
The solution to affordable housing is to just build more housing -- just regular housing. Built it tall, 100 stories or more, and right on top major transportation lines like BART stations -- on all 4 street corners. We'll need to overcome labor costs and zoning before we can get there.
There's a great reddit post where an LA architect specializing in multifamily residential units explains why all of the new units being built in LA are luxury condos instead of low cost housing.
tl;dr: city specific zoning laws.
To be fair, the post is specific to LA, but it makes me wonder what legal hoops developers have to jump through to build in other cities and how expensive those hoops are.
Increase taxes to build affordable housing. Hand the contract over to a developer. Developer builds $700,000 units. The model is not economically sustainable. Increase taxes. Rinse repeat. Now even the middle income people can't afford to buy a $300,000 house, and have to move into the affordable housing. Housing developers are living like kings.
Welcome to the USA, where taxes are spoken for before they are even levied.
The best way to increase worker's income, reduce housing costs and eliminate all the ridiculous laws around housing regulation and property taxes is to replace sales tax and prop taxes for land value taxes.
As soon as the political gain to block construction dissapears, developing anything will be much cheaper and changes into policy will come with popular demand both by renters and landlords.
* Land owners have an absolute right to develop their own land - neighbors can't block you.
* You can build a 60 m^2 x 3 floor house on 100m^2 of land, or more.
So basically they build way denser, and reduce opportunities to block/rentseek.
The central problem is the motive. Low income individuals do not have such a powerful lobby that they're able to compel States to create laws that require affordable housing. It's the real estate/development/construction lobbies. They are very powerful and affordable housing is a big business. Everyone has to get their cut.
It seems to me like one of the big problems with "affordable" housing in desirable areas is that everyone who has bought an "unaffordable" house is now in on the con, and "affordable" housing threatens to correct (read: deflate) the value of the very expensive thing that they have bought.
I'm not a homeowner, but being near NYC, if I manage to get myself into buying a home, I would probably be inclined to support any measure that ensures that the demand for my home—and therefore its price—continues to rise at as great a rate as possible to make sure that I wasn't on the hook for a large depreciation on my mortgaged property. This is the reverse of my current desire, which is for housing to be affordable enough for me to get into so I don't have to rent and can provision that part of my income toward building wealth and not someone else's wealth. The moment I become a homeowner, those motivations flip.
If the median home price were closer to the median income in a given area, I surmise that the desire from homeowners for increased demand and value would abate, because homeowners would stand to gain or lose less in their house vis a vis their income. Instead, you have folks who may gain more value in their homes in one year than they would make in salary. And conversely, price correction at such a great disparity to median income would mean that you now owe the bank a year or more's salary more than what your home is worth.
>who has bought an "unaffordable" house is now in on the con,
Yep, people are using houses as investments instead of just places to live. When a person is invested in something they will willingly engage in behavior that leads to harmful outcomes to everyone, even themselves long term.
A corollary of this is summed up in this famous statement
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Sinclair
Sure, if you're 100% sure you will never move, you can ignore the financial aspect. But people do move, for many reasons. If you owe more than your house is worth, now you're trapped. Hard to ignore.
I assume this is one reason we have zoning rules -- so you know what your neighborhood will look like in 10-20 years. Important with a 30 year mortgage.
(If your point was those with 2nd homes or investment properties that they don't live in -- that's an issue. See Vancouver, and various Bay Area cities.)
Edit: by "investment", you might mean someone seeking an appreciation of $500k vs $300k. I was thinking of $0k vs losing $200k. It happens.
Thats why it should not be a power of a landlord to decide what building goes next to it.
In the end,if sanfrancisco got its act together and build 100,000 units, the city would transform tremendously, with a flush of people, of jobs, of prosperity. The city strangles economic development.
The solution isn't to build artificially affordable housing. The solution is to continue to build what the market demands and give the affluent somewhere to move so that they stop occupying the rest of the city.
Today's luxury housing is tomorrow's affordable housing.
Someone who qualifies for an affordable housing program wouldn't come close to affording your market-priced home, and in practice, creating even 2,000 such units over 15 years is a campaign-centerpiece, career-making accomplishment. To contribute to demand, you have to be able to make a realistic bid. I make well over area median income and I couldn't come close to that. You really think someone at 50% of AMI could?
The position, "I'm not a NIMBY, I just don't like greedy developers getting whatever they want. I would support this project if it were affordable housing" is a common tactic for people who are ostensibly liberal to appear less craven about their home values then they actually are.
Issuing building permits to 100% of the tiny drip of funded affordable housing projects won't change a thing, and they know it.
How much of the build cost is land cost? How much of the build cost is local compliance costs? How much of the cost is market adjusted price, and not actually cost per se?
The challenge really is that people block this kind of development. Most of San Francisco is 2-3 stories with 3-6 units per building. Given the value of the land beneath, that sets a floor on pricing greater than $200k per unit. Then you have to pay for all the legal and development fees to push this through the planning process, and work with the community. The reason developers make small buildings is that they don't stand a chance at getting larger buildings through community input, discretionary reviews and so on.
It's not clear to me that this new bill attempts to address that angle. FAR (floor area ratio) isn't nearly the burden the article makes it sound like, but DR (discretionary review) from neighbors certainly is, and often rightly so. Presumably having a transit bonus on the books will encourage planning to tell people "tough shit" if they're trying to oppose larger projects in transit dense areas. Expect bigger projects in SOMA and the Mission :).
I realize this is a left leaning site and I'll get down-voted, but here is a different pov:
-the reasons things like this are both expensive and 'bad is: the GOV.
Remember that time when the GOV. had this idea to increase home ownership? And '08 was the outcome. That was funny. After GOV f-ted that up, part II: we the tax payers paid the banks. Lots of laughs that was.
What would happen if, now hear me out.... the GOV just went away; lets say something far right: and reduce regulation. Like how many stories you can build in Bay Area. It be like, market would fix it by self. And we would have cheap and affordable housing. Instead, the left uses the gov. against their neighbours.
No?
So for the leftists, just recite your 'narcissist prayer'.
175 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadLet's be frank, affordable housing typically isn't expensive. Construction costs around the country and indeed the developed world aren't too far apart. In the US it's about $100-200 per square foot, in Western-Europe it's €1000-1500 per square metre.
The problem isn't really in construction, typically. Of course, there's always room for improvement everywhere, in construction too. But the big culprit are land prices. Take the Mission, they quote units costing $600k each, not affordable housing. But you're talking about a place where you need to pay $1.5m to just buy the piece of land on which you then build three small $100k units, for an average of $600k each.
Completely different story from the $100k unit in 'Portland', which was actually Gresham, east of Portland, where the average square foot price to buy land+home is <$200. Oh and the units were 375 square foot... $100k is expensive, if anything. The author completely ignores the market realities, again, mostly of expensive land prices.
And this creates the debate as to whether we should subsidise such housing. After all, if you put the same quality house in another city with cheaper land, you could build 4x as many homes, or twice as many that are twice as big or twice as luxurious. Why should we subsidise a fraction of our poor people to live in the most expensive place on the planet with public money that could go towards helping a larger fraction of people?
That's a though question to answer, I find... and I struggle with it, especially because I'm one of those guys who's in favour of these subsidies. Economic segregation is damaging in many ways, plenty of sociological studies have shown. It's important to keep our cities accessible to everyone and create a healthy mix of people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, as opposed to rich enclaves and poor ghettos. But, finding the balance is hard. I don't live in the US but we have similar problems here in Western-Europe with subsidised housing, at the end of the day it's an issue of land prices skyrocketing, it doesn't have as much to do with construction costs as we tend to think. And it's really hard to find the right balance of using public money to buy expensive land for a small group of people.
quick conversion, because i had to google it: there's ~10.5sqft in a square metre, so those costs are roughly equal.
So, a 500 sq. ft home at $50k to $100k is considered affordable?
If I was raising a family, 500 sq. ft. gets cramped real quick.
As long as we are housing gainfully employed single people, no problem.
I suspect the way around this is to require the first X floors to be affordable housing without subsidy, and then let people build as many expensive floors above this as they want. This attacks the problem from both ends by reducing the impact of land prices, avoiding blighted areas, etc. But, avoids directly handing money to developers which is a clear avenue for corruption.
Also not everyone who needs affordable housing is a working class family that is trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You can get a lot of "less desirable" residents like current and recovering addicts or people with mental illnesses. They obviously deserve affordable housing, but you will find that plenty of people who buy luxury apartments don't want to share the elevator with them.
You can just check the Yelp reviews of any building that has a mix of luxury and subsidized housing to see examples of these issues. Buildings like this always attract bad reviews, suffer from high turnover, and therefore have low occupancy rates among their luxury units.
And those are at least as worthy of direct attention and some solution.
If someone cannot handle themselves, maybe they shouldn't be given a subsidized unit in a fancy expensive city, but maybe society should help them by maximizing the help they get, and that is probably somewhere where simply being costs almost nothing, and where employing caretakers wouldn't cost two arms and a leg per hour, and so on. (And of course this doesn't mean ship all the addicts to Alaska/Wyoming.)
If you think about it in another angle, the governments aren't subsidizing to help the tenants as much as they are subsidizing the companies that have to hire people at not executive or programmer wages.
I mean you might get a few people who are willing to commute 4 hours a day, but certainly not enough to satisfy SV's needs. I doubt a company would pay their janitorial staff enough to live there without being forced.
Of course they would if they had to --- supply and demand. Do you really think companies would not find a way to solve the "my office is a pig sty" problem?
Even if it were $100/hr that still doesn’t mean the housing supply would be adequate for the demand.
The only short-term solution that would give sufficient housing supply to the Bay Area would be a massive loss of jobs.
Either way, SF is having the issue they are having because SV had the exact same problem 20 years ago. Everyone knew this was going to happen.
Think people in Tokyo living in "cages". It starts as people renting a 2 BR apartment putting two sets of bunk beds in each room and now you have 8 young wokers playing ~1/5 of a 1br price for the area. But, now you add bunk beds to the living room, or beyond that people hot bunk so someone in the night shift sleeps during the day etc. However, this tends to unsanitary conditions and adds externalities.
It will be smaller than a typical American apartment but at least you won't be sharing with roommates.
I think buildings with both subsidized and market rate units are a great idea. (Segregated subsidized buildings seem to be strictly worse.) But as others mentioned subsidized can mean either "low wage normal folks" or "hardcore bath salts addics living on tree bark with 10 dogs and sold the bathtube for drugs years ago, so they smell worse than their dogs". And they need different kind of help. The former can probably be perfectly happy with their current job thanks to the rent subsidy, whereas the latter category is very likely actively harmful to the community and needs serious (expensive) intervention.
Of course we can debate the problem of injecting even more money into a market with already limited supply, and its fairness.
You need to solve the problem with your plan where the person who gets labelled "cannot handle themselves" is diverted into an isolated setting with much less stimulation/opportunity. You did say you weren't proposing to "ship" "addicts" to Alaska/Wyoming but there's a much higher level of responsibility than that -- you mustn't write them off / throw them on the scrap heap / set them up for an isolated dependent life by your own standards. It could be you one day.
It's a little discomforting how few people seem to care about that.
Why? Barring someone forcibly injecting me with opiates repeatedly or the same with crack, it is beyond unlikely I will ever become addicted to either substance. I don’t think addicts are “bad people”, but once they’ve hit a certain point their physical desire for drugs overwhelms their ability to be present in polite society.
People should be treated with respect and humanity, but they also should not be given a free pass to do anything without consequence. If you’re shitting in the elevator or passing out with a needle in your arm in the restroom in the building it presents a clear problem with the plan of mixing luxury housing with subsidized housing.
I will never be in that situation because I won’t allow myself to be in that situation. I might become poor, I might need to rely on subsidized housing, but I will never be “someone who can not handle themselves” as the GP referenced.
I get that you’re trying to evoke empathy, but there’s a sea of difference in behavior and capability of accepting social norms between your average mentally ill substance abuser and your average poorer person who can’t afford housing. These situations are not the same and there does need to be a filter to ensure that the working poor do get affordable housing without reducing them to having to live alongside “people who can’t handle themselves”.
It’s not a nice thing to realize, but it’s the hard truth. We, if anything, should start providing state run mental facilities for long-term patients again. There are a lot of people who through circumstance or birth simply are not capable of coexisting with polite society.
How do you intend to accomplish that? Remember we live in a world where people have accidents with cars, guns, and preparation of prescription medicines. You do not control everyone else, yet everyone else has the potential to alter your lifestyle in a few moments of recklessness or distraction.
Force majeur exists in contract law for a reason.
Accomplishing this is simple, but not necessarily easy. You make a choice.
As I mentioned, literally barring someone physically overpowering me and forcibly injecting me with addictive drugs, I will never be a drug addict because I simply refuse to take addictive drugs. Yes, that includes painkillers that may be prescribed. I took none of the hydrocodone tablets I was prescribed after my wisdom teeth extraction. I'm currently using non-pharmaceutical approaches to managing chronic back pain from an injury rather than relying on opiate painkillers which doctors are happy to prescribe.
I am not blaming people for their choices, but I am recognizing that externalities that feed into our choices don't excuse the outcomes.
Opportunity is relative. By giving it to one person, you're taking it away from another.
Currently substance abuse is either actively criminalized with enormous costs to humanity (probably millions dead due to the various criminal organizations participating in the trade of prohibited substances) or at best relegated to intervention reality shows.
Furthermore, treatment of most mental illnesses are very superficial nowadays, we have a few volunteer/charitable organizations acting as support systems, but mainly it's pills and some expensive counseling and you're good to go, right back into your old environment, old social circles, old habits, old context.
I'm not saying it should be state mandated, but it could be a lot more state supported.
I can see both sides of the argument, but we need to figure out how to build cities that work or we are in for a lot of chaos.
http://voxeu.org/article/tall-buildings-and-land-values
Don't you have to figure out the overall proportion of affordable housing to regular housing?
Why is this the obvious solution? Why not spread people out instead of trying to cram as many as you can into the same place?
At the end? Normal people fled. Because more often than not. People living from state are... not really nice neighbours...
I lived in such a "planned" Village.
It started as an expensive nice village. With swimming bath. Saune, bowling etc.
Now it a Ghetto, because everyone with money fled.
So until there are systems in place that are stronger and longer lasting than the economic, educational, and cultural problems which that would create, I think it remains an immoral choice.
True equal access to top tier education (and not watered down education for all), a true living wage and/or guaranteed income, and some way to break through the cultural issues, including prevalent violence and drug use* that such a solution would perpetuate need to come first to all cities. Only then would that become a practical solution. So yes, in theory. But it is at best decades away as a solution, and realistically probably closer to a century away.
* since among the poor, there would be a higher concentration of drug addicts than elsewhere, and they would then have a greater influence on others.
But rather, that it's hard to find the balance. Particularly because you've got genuine concerns from the hundred thousand poor people who weren't able to get in on those sweet but few 100 subsidised units in the mission who have their minds blown that their municipality spent $600k a unit for them with public money that should go to their quality of life, too. What do you say to them...
Sounds to me like if land, not construction, is the dominant factor in cost, luxury and affordable units should cost about the same amount. Unless the affordable units were higher density.
BART plans a billion dollar bandaid by digging out the other side of the station to allow boarding from both sides of the tunnel. But that billion dollars doesn't buy any additional tracks, just an extra exit from the sides of the trains.
Even the new 6+ billion dollar transit center is only going to have 3 platforms and 6 tracks for Caltrain and HSR. In comparison, Penn Station has 11 platforms & 21 tracks.
What the bay area needs is a regional government that could set reasonable housing and transit policy instead of dozens of disjointed communities that only want office space and no housing and stand in the way of transit improvements.
There's no single solution that will solve the housing problem -- it'll take more housing closer to jobs, and better transit. (I purposely left out traffic improvements since that's a short-term bandaid)
China is spending trillions on infrastructure and trains and we whine about 6b for a huge train station in the center of a hundred year old city, while we give $1.5 trillion tax cuts to corporations
The city people are too rich to have to associate with the poor. They'll send their kids to private schools, etc. They eat at different restaurants, shop at different stores.
They (the people in charge of cities like Mountain View) mostly don't want it both ways, they'd rather have the status quo go on, which is why they throw up these requirements in the first place.
This is exactly what cities should be doing to grow in a smart way: collect those fees to improve city infrastructure, to accommodate the new housing (and business). Improve transportation! Widen roads, add bike lanes. Add schools and parks and libraries. Add water/sewer/electrical/internet that connect to the developments -- that isn't free. How else are these paid for?
One interesting starting point is a study called 'are ghettos good or bad?'. It's a little dated, 20 years old now, especially with economic segregation on the rise since then and a sharp increase of academic interest in the topic. But it sets the tone and introduces a little bit of theoretical history, provides empirical evidence for the notion that economic segregation is damaging, as well as its causal direction (ghettos create bad outcomes, rather than vice versa), although it lacks in explanatory power. The NBER is typically well-respected. You can find it here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w5163.pdf
For something more recent, this report is another good place to start. The Urban Institute is quite liberal though, so its research is a bit more partisan than a typical academic piece, but it's still good stuff. This research, and others, suggests that it's not just low-income groups who suffer from economic segregation, but that it affects all residents negatively as well, on average. (mostly for two reasons: one is that when low-income groups are worse off, their issues e.g. with crime or drugs spill over to non low-income communities, and two that, simply said, a Google engineer is more productive if he doesn't have to spend his day preparing food and doing laundry, so you need a healthy mix of people and proximity matters).
https://www.urban.org/research/publication/cost-segregation
Hope to be of more help next month.
Here is one perspective on "why urbanization" - https://graylinegroup.com/urbanization-catalyst-overview/
Fifty years ago, if the husband gets a job offer in a town of 10,000 people with one main employer, he'll take it and relocate the family there. It doesn't matter that there's no career prospects for the wife, because she isn't likely to be working in a career job.
Today, the husband (or wife) gets the same job offer, but the family doesn't take it because the other spouse works in public relations (or whatever) and there are no good jobs of that type in the small 1-industry town.
Thanks!
End tax breaks for real estate owners and end the ability to speculate on home prices on a large scale, and housing will become much more affordable.
Or institute a Land Tax, which incentivizes high levels of housing density and housing availability. A land tax is also the most efficient type of tax that exists, and acts as an moderate wealth equalizer.
The other thing the argument does is assume we have an "expensive land" problem. We don't. In most cases it's construction costs that are unacceptably high, not land costs.
In Philly and Baltimore, the situation is the same as described in the article. The estimates for building new low cost housing are up to 10 times the cost for private development, so it does not get built - and the land goes back to private developers, and sold to the wealthy. This has been a constant issue for as long as I have lived in these cities.
The rents in Philly are higher, but nowhere near those of the Bay Area. Here is an article about the local market: https://www.google.com/amp/s/cdn.relaymedia.com/amp/billypen...
People are angry that although they can afford a perfectly standard apartment, they can't afford new construction. Apartment developments being abandoned before completion due to low demand. Market distortions caused by development restrictions during the 90s.
If this is what we get as an answer to such an important question, I can't really trust them to really be forthright when it comes to understanding the issues of cities. When people complain about the media, this is the kind of sloppy thing people complaint about.
The commonly perceived idea that land prices invariably increase when upzonings occur is only true in the context of how they occur today: very slowly, in extremely limited numbers, after years of lobbying the government for changes. Land prices are determined by their highest best use, and right now, with extremely scarce housing supply, that highest and best use will always be the most dense possible development imaginable. But that isn't guaranteed to be true.
What would happen if all of the land was developable at density? It certainly wouldn't be scarce, and with heavily increased competition it likely wouldn't be very profitable to build either. Seattle's 83 sq miles of land, at the midrise levels of central Paris, would accommodate 4.6M people, 25% more than the entire 8000 sq mile metro region currently houses. It would take an inward migration of several millions of people before the highest and best use of most land parcels would be to build extremely densely everywhere. There just would not be enough demand to justify midrises everywhere.
So while most centrally located land (like the handful of neighborhoods directly adjacent to downtown) might result in land price increases (because dense developments can actually attract enough demand to fill them), it would likely end up with lower land prices in neighborhoods further out like Beacon Hill or Ballard.
So if you want to lower the costs of affordable or transitional housing development, you gotta do the same exact thing that you would do to lower the prices of market rate housing.
Exactly, which is why there is zero mystery here. This is an entirely artificial, legal challenge. We already know what happens if we let cities develop organically, because we've already built places like Brooklyn and Queens.
But then with NYC densities would NYC prices follow? Put it this way, do we have examples where higher densities didn't lead to unexpected higher prices due to critical population mass being achieved?
Induced demand, or something with a similar effect, seems to apply to housing at least as much as it does to traffic.
And before we dismiss it entirely as "coasts are more desirable than landlocked middle America," let's take a look at both various coastal cities of varying density in California[0] and various less-desirable (Houston is technically coastal, I suppose, but not in the "good weather" or "pleasant" way) Texas[1]. San Diego is cheaper than SF or LA, but also much less dense. Fort Worth is cheaper than Dallas, but also much less dense, and pretty much right next door in the middle of a bunch of flat land.
Maybe we should start knocking down a bunch of non-affordable housing, run off the people with enough money to move away, and watch that affordability go up? ;)
[0 ] https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/california-rent-re...
[1] https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/california-rent-re...
Because affordability is inversely proportional to demand, and higher-demand areas tend to have more dense housing.
The same way "add another lane to the highway" doesn't fix traffic.
Rents haven't always been as high in NYC as they are now. It's not as though the city's history is one of inducing demand that it can't meet with adequate supply.
The city has always been expensive, but not in the ridiculous way it is today. I'll leave the inflation calculations to you, but this demonstrates my point:
http://www.millersamuel.com/change-is-constant-100-years-of-...
Sure the same pattern of induced demand may occur with housing development, but induced demand in urban development a bad thing? There is evidence that if actually accommodated that induced demand over the last half century, instead of suppressing it, that our national economic growth would have been 50% higher than it actually was.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154
What is the correct density? It's the exact density that existed when I bought in. That's what people -- incumbents, I mean -- are really saying.
That could very well be because growth in demand has outstripped increase in supply without any sort of feedback relationship, but that itself raises interesting follow-up questions. Is rapid growth undesirable for everyone not directly benefiting from higher salaries from the growth, which is probably most people? Do developers have an incentive to keep growth in supply lagging, since it means they can get a lot more return on investment for what they do raise funds to build? Even for homeowners, your property values go up, but so does everyone else's, so you're not relatively any better off/able to upgrade. What are the political implications of that, if so?
In the past, productivity was not so concentrated in a handful of cities, making me skeptical of that linked model. Big confounding factors there in the death of industries across most of the country happening at the same time as increased global prominence and money concentrating to more and more first-and-second-tier cities.
What that sort of model also misses is that you have at least as many people preferring low density to high density as the reverse (based on empirical trends in the post-car US), and you also have a lot of people who won't be happy with a solution to job distribution that's just "pull up your roots and move to a better city, sorry." It doesn't seem to result in constructive policy recommendations that have a snowball's chance of being welcomed.
China has seen unbelievably explosive growth in its cities and has also seen 1 billion people lifted out of poverty during exactly the same time period. Coincidence? People flock to cities because they can get paid five times more than they could back in their home village – they're not cavorting, scheming millionaires. Trying to strangle your cities because cities are bad is the dumbest thing you could do in terms of economic growth other than than trying to strangle trade on the theory that those scheming foreigners are going to take all of our money away.
I'm sure downtown Shenzen is more expensive today than it was when it was a small fishing village. Would the world be a better place if it had been kept as a small fishing village?
Wait, you don't think China has been doing this too?
---
The US has had decentralized economic booms in the past; even China's current one is based around several cities and regions, and China continues to build outwards, not simply make Beijing and Shanghai ever denser inside the same radius. They do it at a higher density than we do in the US, sure, but other than that the strategy doesn't seem completely unfathomable - I think the Chinese-style answer to the Bay Area is less likely to be "make SF denser" and more "move a bunch of development to the East Bay or Dublin or something and make new companies start up over there."
Expanding on what I said in a separate comment (sigh, I was headed to bed, maybe after this one), we are currently in the US letting many of our cities die while putting a ton of eggs into NYC/SF/etc baskets. I don't think further density in just a few places is going to fix anything price-wise or have any superior outcomes than reducing those bottlenecks would.
If Bay Area governments were as NIMBY about desks as they were about beds, we might not be in this mess. Now that we've built the desks, we need the beds to go with them. (Or burn down the desks? The sheer comedic value of a government on an explicit job-destroying program might be worth it).
Because density and affordability aren't really related. The only thing that really affects affordability are supply and demand. As a proof of this, feel free to peruse the Journal of Housing Economics for empirical housing price models. Almost none of them show density as a significant factor, and almost all of them demonstrate the dominance of one single metric: the vacancy rate. Literally, the vacancy rate is the only thing that matters. And density is only related in the sense that it is one of the possible ways to increase the vacancy rate.
Jobs create demand. Jobs bring skilled workers. The presence of skilled workers itself attracts more employers. Maybe the employers move in faster than upzoning happens. Maybe it happens slower. Whether or not this increases or decreases price is just a question of the coefficients on the various inputs. I'd still propose that the missing piece is geographic - cities that can absorb this by growing outward in a decentralized way will stay cheaper than ones that can't, where things get nasty.
But, to move the discussion along, let's just call it demand outrunning growth in supply, dropping the precise role of density (or replacing density in my original post with "geographic constraints which necessitate increased density" or something). Either way the result is the same thing. Do we have ideas that we could try to get turned into policy for stopping this sort of thing from happening? It's a really common pattern, not just in SF but everywhere that's ever seen someone complain about gentrification, so it would be a useful thing to have a politically feasible solution for.
EDIT: it's getting late out here, so I'll add one last bit then probably retire for now. I personally am not a fan of remote work, or cross-timezone collaboration. But I think the people pushing it need to win out in the long run. When it comes to massive density increases, or de-densifying the country by spreading work back out thanks to technology allowing better and better telepresence, I think the latter is far healthier in the end. It de-SPOF-ifies industries, which is good when considering natural disasters, potential climate impacts, or war/terrorism. It levels out costs - you now have the whole country (world?) to choose from - while also massively increasing your hiring pool. It evens out opportunity - you don't have to be able to afford to take a gamble on moving across the country to chase your dream job. It saves a shit-ton when it comes to energy used for commuting.
And if you ask me if a less dense, remote-friendly world is more likely than getting people to reverse course on a hundred-year-old car-powered trend towards suburbanization, I'd wager yes. Especially because the arguments for the latter are pretty unconvincing so far for people who don't want to live somewhere massively denser and who are able to afford their current living situation.
What it also shows is how open to changes a given market is; if there's too much vacancy (think Detroit) then it's clear that something went VERY wrong in the market.
If there's too little vacancy (think SF, Seattle, etc) then what went wrong is mostly NIMBY and regulations failing to pair jobs and housing increases together. The result is a lack of flexibility and skyrocketing prices.
And it isn't even just a discussion about low density states vs high density states. Take one of the highest density states, Massachusetts. Its density is about 800 people per square mile. That's nothing... A square mile is almost 28 million square foot. You're talking about having about 35 thousand square foot, per person, of space.
In fact, here are some images of population density of 100.000 people per square mile, more than 100x more dense than one of the highest density US state averages:
https://ggwash.org/view/42469/what-do-80000-people-in-a-squa...
And here's an interesting article about the amount of space needed to give all 7 billion people on the planet a standard vancouver house+yard lot.
https://vreaa.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/land-not-making-any-m...
Which also cites another calculation on how the entire world population could fit into Texas if it were built as dense as NYC.
The issue isn't really sheer population, it's population distribution. Proximity to other people means proximity to jobs, culture, networks etc. And that means we see small plots of land become extremely scarce and in high-demand, and large plots of land become extremely abundant and in low-demand. You can see this if you look up economic heatmaps of the US, it's pretty insane. Most countries are basically a collection of a few cities where all the money is made and everyone lives. I wouldn't be surprised if cities became the dominant political unit rather than nation states. (not legally, but in practice). I can't find a great image at the moment but this gives an idea: https://cdn.howmuch.net/content/images/1600/where-the-money-...
The problem is not just land, it's energy use and resource consumption, traffic, and location desirability.
There's no need for more people on the planet, even if we can efficiently put them somewhere.
The SF bay area seems to have finally hit that point where the restaurants and so on are being forced to raise their wages because they can't hire people, and that generally seems like a good thing. It's better if the wages reflect the costs.
We have a housing glut in this country, most of it is just in places that are far from jobs, services, transit, and community amenities. If we created more moderately sized, walkable, transit friendly cities this problem wouldn’t be so bad.
Everyone wants to cram into SF, NY, and a handful of other places because of the access to economic opportunity and urbanist lifestyle. If they could get some measure of that elsewhere, even a not as good but okay enough version, many would gladly move and alleviate the pressure. But because of how we do our built environments these dense cities are islands of urbanism in an ocean of sprawl.
That means investing not all in one spot. You're only making these spikes bigger: http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
Municipalities should lead the charge, but together with companies. Proximity to jobs is incredibly important. If anything, it could be good for companies too. You don't need to compensate a software engineer to the extent that he can afford >$1k per square foot prices.
What we don't really bluntly talk about is this: tech companies are spending more on real estate via their HR budgets than on actual talent. After all, we compensate similar talent very differently depending on the local cost of living which is a variable mostly dominated by housing costs. That means HR budgets are in large part dominated by housing costs.
Obviously this is not uncontroversial. Many in the 'receiving' community will hate to see cost of living rise when SF Jr. and its Tech Jr. companies move in, particularly those who aren't the owner class but the labourer class. It reeks of gentrification. But there has to be a way to make that work better than it does now, which is investing everything in a small radius, attracting all companies and all people, and making it wholly unaffordable while the rest of the country is drained of talent, jobs, economic activity and becomes extremely affordable in terms of land but unable to support any population. There has to be a middle-ground between the two positions.
The affordable units is a clever scheme to block construction.
The quote about reducing the regulatory burden for but only for affordable housing to cut down on the cost seems telling - essentially admitting that at least some portion of the regulations in place aren't necessary and are simply a waste of money.
It is not such an admission, because it could just as well view the regulation as generally beneficial but in tension with the goal of providing affordable housing.
You are viewing desirability of regulation in an unreasonably context-blind and binary manner.
Here's why they make sense:
1. They can be cheap because they can be built in places with low land prices and low regulations. These are the chief factors in why housing is so expensive.
2. They can solve desirability by building together that stuff that makes a city desirable - other people, businesses, walkability, modern design.
3. They're more feasible than ever because remote work is so practical that you don't have to live in the middle of a city for a job.
4. A model for bringing people who have this goal together has been recently validated on a large scale (kickstarter type systems).
So I'm left wondering - am I just not seeing the projects or why have I not heard of them?
Remote work isn't actually feasible for most people. It's feasible for software engineers, and some other high-paid jobs, that don't have much of a problem paying high rent prices.
The things that make a city desirable (and supportable) are largely natural features of its location, which you either can't currently practically engineer (pleasant weather) or which are very expensive to engineer (like access to fresh water supply). Places that are currently unpopulated and have low land prices are usually lacking these things.
Massive Winter Storm Hits Northeast - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/04/575643483...
Because those places have desirable geographical features, like access to fresh water (flood plains tend to have this in spades), access to arable land (doesn't always support high density, but supports at least people to farm and support farming, because people living elsewhere need to eat), access to natural features that are convenient in trade (like navigable waterways and natural harbors), access to valuable natural resources, etc.
The problem is that human beings generally hate them.
For a good example of this (and why), check out (http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...).
Income source strikes me as the most significant challenge. How will the citizens of these communities earn money? In addition to remote work, local manufacturing, education, healthcare, public safety, tourism, and service industry can help fill the gap. Quite a master planning challenge though!
Access to natural resources is a challenge, but that challenge might spark solutions we’ll need other places on Earth and as we colonize the Moon and Mars. People already choose to live in many inhospitable regions, depending on purchased water or routinely damaged by predictably destructive weather patterns (I’ve often wondered why wealthy New York financial firms don’t relocate somewhere sunny).
Sustainability is another question I have. Is it more sustainable for us to build up in cities than to set up distributed towns? Do we need to pivot how we aspire to live and what we aspire to own from standalone houses to dense high rise units?
I mean that's Miami to NYC in less than 2 hours.
Because the places are either (or both) unattractive to live for environmental/geographic reasons or have an economy that can offers few (if any) additional decent paying jobs and can support few (if any) additional people without jobs.
Prices reflect the market’s assessment of value, and usually there is a reason for that assessment.
And then the city paid a variety of contractors to build studio apartments which would rent for $500/month without any commitments, deposit or credit score. With 2-4BR for families.
The thought is the city, community & companies build up immense value for real estate owners. It's somewhat unfair to create this fantastic system we have in the Bay Area, where all these smart hardworking people gravitate to work on new, sometimes transformative ideas but then we channel lots of the profits to early real estate holders who effectively got lucky. While unnecessarily adding a ton of stress to people's lives.
Of course, it would never be implemented. But the basic idea is that all apartment rentals would be through an open system via local government and all condos & homes would require the owner to live in them.
If by a miracle this hump could be got over, it would also lead to massive problems of supply. 100% of new developments having to be sold to owner occupiers, or be paid for by the government, would make it hard to impossible for either side to build much more supply. I can't start a new development unless I am sure I can sell 100% to owners, or the government buys some of the units. Hello massive corruption!
Lastly, https://pics.me.me/the-30-second-guide-to-government-spendin... is an example of how people buy. A Government run rental market would have ridiculously impractical houses, as now governments would have the ability to manipulate the housing market for votes. "X government built practical, affordable no frills units, but you hate them. We'll build you all places you love". Disaster number, what, 7?
It is just a disaster from every possible, conceivable angle.
* Affordable Housing returns are always below market-rate housing. * Requiring a percentage of building to be affordable housing is a tax. Builders have an interest in avoiding taxes. * Acquiring an affordable housing unit is a long term benefit. Those advocating for housing have an interest in acquiring benefits. * Long term housing prices are driven by regional economics. * Short term housing prices are can be manipulated. Solving manipulations like the simultaneous remodeling of large complexes; raising rates with too little notice to effectively move; or jumping rates by high percentages in a year have different solutions.
Thinking in these terms separates concerns of equity in society; the high cost of service workers in congested areas; the rise of empty buildings; the gouging of existing tenants; and subsidized housing for some workers.
Recognize this debate has been going for a while. On could argue that providing cheap housing for the Phoenician immigrants would make Athens better for Athenians, or that people like Plato need an affordable place to live to make our city-state great!
We can build 800sq. ft. (75 sq. m.) apartments in 3 story buildings for about $40,000, not counting land.
But we don't. Because most Americans don't want to live in 800 sq. ft. and most builders want to cater to the middle standard deviations of the population. They make more money selling to people who make more money.
E.g., is the question really "why is affordable housing so expensive?" or is it "why is housing so expensive?" They hint that publicly funded housing might be more expensive, with a mealy-mouthed "the case has been made". But they give just one apples-to-oranges comparison, and, worse, one hypothetical comparison. Where's the statistical data?
It also doesn't look at all at why we need affordable housing. E.g., with rapidly spiking inequality (in the US generally, and especially in SF), demand for affordable housing is going up.
In talking like we can't afford it, it doesn't put numbers to that, either. For example, in 2015 the US spent $71 billion on the mortgage interest tax credit, 90% of which went to households making over $100k/year. If we stopped subsidizing the housing of rich people, could we afford to subsidize the housing of poor people? And might that giant subsidy be part of why housing is so expensive?
So A+ title, D+ content.
We've reached a point where certain places - London, NYC, San Francisco, Singapore, Hong Kong and perhaps even Shanghai - are so large and economically important that the idea they should include affordable housing, when there are alternatives that are much more financially effective, seems a little off to me.
I'm not sure why anyone would want to live in affordable housing in SF, when everything is so expensive. Wouldn't it make more sense to move whole family groups to Portland, for the same prices as one of those families could live in SF? Not even that far, to Oakland maybe, or the outskirts.
And why is the right abstraction one house? A policy of whole family moves, or community moves so people keep their connections, would seem like a more sensible idea. People stay in areas that are awful often because they don't want to lose those connections - which I 100% get. So why not move groups of people - willingly - so they have the best of both worlds?
So there is precedent for what you’re proposing.
But the argument against it is that people have some sort of right to remain in their “homeland”. And that a city whose “native sons” can’t afford to live in it isn’t a healthy city. That a healthy city has places for both rich and poor. For owners and operators. For speculators and locals.
Your theory that we should move all the poor people in groups to less appealing areas to make room for the incoming rich is horrific to me. Especially since, in America at least, this will often effectively be government-sponsored ethnic cleansing.
There are two reasons: one is that the units are built out more luxurious than they need to be. At least 30-40% higher.
The second is union labor (or prevailing wage) you're spending three times the amount on labor as hiring local, cheaper labor.
Please tell me where these are, I’d love to know so I can redevelop them and make a few million.
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/10/11/emeryville-affordabl...
It's not exactly located in cheap area either.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/3706+San+Pablo+Ave/@37.832...
Building up makes sense, but considering complete lack of undeveloped land in this area, that's not really feasible.
In some countries, residents of a city block can work with real estate developers to build-up, and as long as 80%-85% agree, the project proceeds. Not sure if equivalent mechanism exists in CA.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi.... regular brand new houses (not "affordable" housing) are actually affordable at $150k, or less than a down payment in any west coast US city.
https://www.zillow.com/ms/new-homes/
Or check out a brand new 2200sq ft house in Indiana for $200,000 that would sell for about $2.5 million in the Bay Area, or about $1.5 million in Seattle or Portland
https://www.zillow.com/community/harrison-lakes/2095745355_z...
Sometimes I wonder why people aren't more willing to move to new states. I realize that Indiana and Mississippi aren't particularly "cool" and certainly not trendy, but what matters more in life? Being in a trendy spot, or actually being able to afford a reasonable lifestyle?
The price per square foot with the exact same materials, finishes, construction quality, etc - not including cost of land - is 1/5 or less in a state like IN, MS, WI, MN, etc than CA, WA, OR, why is that?
These states are in the same country with the same first world amenities.
Just because you can buy cheap house in Mississippi is not going to cause young doctors, engineers, lawyers, other professionals and graduates from top schools to start migrating there. It's just not worth it for them, they are looking at their long term career prospects and can do the math.
But really, even at the much lower income levels of the south the money goes so much further.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/half-a-house/
But what about the land? I don't think that has to be the major cost, at least in San Francisco. There are a plenty of vacant lots owned by the city, and in a recent case the feds sold land for $1 to the city for pre-fab condos near the court house for 'formerly homeless'. Indeed, if you have an apartment, you are no longer homeless.
And this is where we start talking about the real expense -- union labor. The pre-fab units clock in at under 250k each, but they are built over in Vacaville with non-union labor. Anything else needs highly paid craftsmen which goose a market rate unit over 700k+. If the lot needs to be abated for pollution, usually for former gas station sites, the price goes even higher plus delays. Want steel framing for going over 7 stories? The price goes up. Not that SF Planning's zoning will allow 7 stories, even near BART.
The solution to affordable housing is to just build more housing -- just regular housing. Built it tall, 100 stories or more, and right on top major transportation lines like BART stations -- on all 4 street corners. We'll need to overcome labor costs and zoning before we can get there.
tl;dr: city specific zoning laws.
To be fair, the post is specific to LA, but it makes me wonder what legal hoops developers have to jump through to build in other cities and how expensive those hoops are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...
Welcome to the USA, where taxes are spoken for before they are even levied.
As soon as the political gain to block construction dissapears, developing anything will be much cheaper and changes into policy will come with popular demand both by renters and landlords.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
* Land owners have an absolute right to develop their own land - neighbors can't block you. * You can build a 60 m^2 x 3 floor house on 100m^2 of land, or more.
So basically they build way denser, and reduce opportunities to block/rentseek.
I'm not a homeowner, but being near NYC, if I manage to get myself into buying a home, I would probably be inclined to support any measure that ensures that the demand for my home—and therefore its price—continues to rise at as great a rate as possible to make sure that I wasn't on the hook for a large depreciation on my mortgaged property. This is the reverse of my current desire, which is for housing to be affordable enough for me to get into so I don't have to rent and can provision that part of my income toward building wealth and not someone else's wealth. The moment I become a homeowner, those motivations flip.
If the median home price were closer to the median income in a given area, I surmise that the desire from homeowners for increased demand and value would abate, because homeowners would stand to gain or lose less in their house vis a vis their income. Instead, you have folks who may gain more value in their homes in one year than they would make in salary. And conversely, price correction at such a great disparity to median income would mean that you now owe the bank a year or more's salary more than what your home is worth.
Yep, people are using houses as investments instead of just places to live. When a person is invested in something they will willingly engage in behavior that leads to harmful outcomes to everyone, even themselves long term.
A corollary of this is summed up in this famous statement
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Sinclair
I assume this is one reason we have zoning rules -- so you know what your neighborhood will look like in 10-20 years. Important with a 30 year mortgage.
(If your point was those with 2nd homes or investment properties that they don't live in -- that's an issue. See Vancouver, and various Bay Area cities.)
Edit: by "investment", you might mean someone seeking an appreciation of $500k vs $300k. I was thinking of $0k vs losing $200k. It happens.
In the end,if sanfrancisco got its act together and build 100,000 units, the city would transform tremendously, with a flush of people, of jobs, of prosperity. The city strangles economic development.
Today's luxury housing is tomorrow's affordable housing.
The position, "I'm not a NIMBY, I just don't like greedy developers getting whatever they want. I would support this project if it were affordable housing" is a common tactic for people who are ostensibly liberal to appear less craven about their home values then they actually are.
Issuing building permits to 100% of the tiny drip of funded affordable housing projects won't change a thing, and they know it.
The challenge really is that people block this kind of development. Most of San Francisco is 2-3 stories with 3-6 units per building. Given the value of the land beneath, that sets a floor on pricing greater than $200k per unit. Then you have to pay for all the legal and development fees to push this through the planning process, and work with the community. The reason developers make small buildings is that they don't stand a chance at getting larger buildings through community input, discretionary reviews and so on.
It's not clear to me that this new bill attempts to address that angle. FAR (floor area ratio) isn't nearly the burden the article makes it sound like, but DR (discretionary review) from neighbors certainly is, and often rightly so. Presumably having a transit bonus on the books will encourage planning to tell people "tough shit" if they're trying to oppose larger projects in transit dense areas. Expect bigger projects in SOMA and the Mission :).
-the reasons things like this are both expensive and 'bad is: the GOV. Remember that time when the GOV. had this idea to increase home ownership? And '08 was the outcome. That was funny. After GOV f-ted that up, part II: we the tax payers paid the banks. Lots of laughs that was.
- Here is NY creating jobs: http://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/politics-on-the-hud...
What would happen if, now hear me out.... the GOV just went away; lets say something far right: and reduce regulation. Like how many stories you can build in Bay Area. It be like, market would fix it by self. And we would have cheap and affordable housing. Instead, the left uses the gov. against their neighbours.
No? So for the leftists, just recite your 'narcissist prayer'.